Baltimore Orioles

My 11-year-old was horrified. He couldn’t understand how we could have a meeting with the 1969 Sporting News Rookie of the Year and all his dad wanted to talk about with Carlos May was events surrounding the life of his older brother.

The Orioles will kick off their 20th anniversary season at Oriole Park at Camden Yards with an Opening Day game on April 6, 2012 against the Minnesota Twins, 20 years to the day after the ballpark originally opened.

Stinking Chicago. I still recall the conversation with a local sportswriter who knew baseball well. I dropped the name of Ken Singleton to him sometime in the mid 1990s. It rang no bells. He thought I was thinking of Chris Singleton. Even when Chris Singleton joined the Birds for the 2002 season, I never really thought of Chris Singleton.

Pedro Strop is a power pitcher who can throw 94-95 mph with some late life off to the right side of the plate. His slider has some work for repetitive action, but shows as a potential swing and miss offering in the mid 80s.

The Orioles took awhile to figure out the marketing game. Recall, those great playoff years of 1969-71, the attendance figures barely topped a 1,000,000 every year. Or add up three World Series seasons and you won’t get what the Orioles received in the fan department in the 1997 season (3,711,132).

It’s still hard to swallow that 75 percent of the four twenty-game winners from 1971 are now deceased. That includes the crafty Cuban Mike Cuellar and the Snake, Pat Dobson. And on Dec. 1, 2002, cancer claimed the life of Billings, Montana’s David Arthur McNally.